China fines Kuaishou over $17 million for failure to curb offensive content

BEIJING, Feb 6 (Reuters) - China's cyberspace regulator on Friday fined Kuaishou Technology 1024.HK 119.1 million yuan ($17.2 million) and issued a warning after finding the short-video platform had failed to adequately curb pornographic and vulgar livestream content.

Kuaishou was hit by a livestreaming cyberattack at around 10 p.m. Beijing time (1400 GMT) on December 22, in which many users said they had been exposed to vulgar, violent or otherwise explicit content.

The company on Friday acknowledged it had failed to respond fast enough to the attack, "resulting in a large amount of pornographic and vulgar content on the platform".

It pledged to "resolutely rectify" the issue.

The regulator said in a statement that Kuaishou had failed to address system vulnerabilities and other risks promptly, and ordered it to take remedial action and punish those responsible.

Last month, an e-commerce unit of Kuaishou, the closest rival to TikTok's Chinese version Douyin, was fined 26.7 million yuan for offences including charging "unreasonable" fees.
($1 = 6.9389 Chinese yuan renminbi)